The Great Weaver From Kashmir (10 page)

This was a few years after Grímúlfur and your father, Þorsteinn, started in on their business enterprise; business boomed, and out of it grew Ylfingur. Grímúlfur was more like Örnólfur in those days than now. Of course he was never so charming nor as beautifully built as his younger brother, nor as talented, but a lot of girls desired him, because he was a renowned financier and had everything it took to become fabulously wealthy. One winter he asked me to a dance; I'll tell you about it in as few words as possible, because the story of our coming together is in fact so unremarkable. I was in fairly poor condition: I looked horrible, and I knew it. Even if I was fully mature by my eighteenth year and had long been used to being looked upon as a grown-up girl, on that particular night the gentlemen wouldn't give me a second glance. I suppose that even then I was already considered Grímúlfur's betrothed. Long before the dance was over I went to him and asked him to take me home. My throat was tight from holding back sobs, and I couldn't say anything. He wanted to take my arm, but I wouldn't let him. I wanted to make him follow me, but this didn't work and I felt even more resentful. By the time we reached the foyer back home, I was completely deranged and no longer knew what I was doing. Just as soon as he had taken my cloak, I threw my arms with no warning around his neck and cried loudly
at his breast in some sort of lunatic ecstasy, begged him to help me, said that I loved him, and so on. Thus was the groundwork laid for my marriage to Grímúlfur, Diljá dear.

When we married I celebrated having been consecrated into the same sort of life of luxury in which I was raised, and I looked forward to the joys of wedlock, because in my childishness I had often thought that marriage meant the fulfillment of all hopes. This is what all of us women think before we wake up to reality; and our bosoms bubble and boil like mud springs from this incomprehensible yearning to encompass all the happiness of Heaven and Earth.

But nothing is further than marriage from being able to satisfy the desires of a true woman – I don't mean those soulless female things that let themselves be used like dull screws in the machine of society. The true woman soon discovers that the happiness of marriage is not the fulfillment of all hopes, but rather the relinquishment of all hopes: “resignation”; and that without this relinquishment there is no happiness. Marriage is a shipwreck in which the cruise ship is tossed against a cliff, a bankruptcy in which youth has nothing left over but debt. Nothing is more empty and sad than the long insomniac days of the first year of marriage, unless, perhaps, the grave itself. Imagine the young wife as she sits at home sleepy and alone and breathes in the revolting stenches of the new home, or else invites her girlfriends over, reluctant, cold, and matured after the fresh experience of her honeymoon. But the man doesn't come home until evening, because he promised himself to another bride before his wife: his business, and its demands come before all others. And when a newly wedded woman finds herself at home surrounded
by the brand-new furniture in her living room, she discovers that she herself is actually nothing but a piece of furniture, purchased to complete the ridiculous unit that the man calls his home. And when she takes her girlfriends from room to room to show them the wedding gifts, oh, all that disgusting cursed rubbish made of gold and silver and who knows what! – living room furniture, dining room furniture, the salon, the boudoir, the bathroom, the bedrooms – oh the smell, the smell! – then in her heart she feels almost the same as if she were showing them the crypt where her corpse is to wait for Doomsday.

The man she marries is never the same whom she saw in her dreams, never the one she expected. The man she marries is never anyone but the one she let take her, the one into whose arms she threw herself in a kind of bewilderment, because she couldn't find the one about whom she dreamt. The man she married was the one who offered her gold and green forests. She uses all of her powers of self-deception to settle for whatever he lacks of the outstanding qualities of her dream man, and even succeeds from time to time in convincing herself that her husband is a perfect image of the one she longed for, and determines to do everything she can to enjoy with him what she had imagined enjoying with her dream man. But all the time she knows this one thing, despite all the deception: that he is still not the same man she had desired. She might live with him her whole life and raise children for him, but nothing else is guaranteed except that deep, deep within her is hidden the hope that in spite of her fate and her ruined palaces, the moment might come when her sweetheart will suddenly sweep into her dull, everyday life: she quickens when he grasps her hand, trembles at
his glance, her heartbeat is irregular, and all of the pillars of her past tumble down like a house of cards. And then she knows that nothing can hinder her any further, and she seizes the first opportunity to cheat on her husband and drown herself in the embrace of the man who gives her everything, and she is lost. In sin alone is the fulfillment of all her hopes.

“Who gives her everything” – how misguided it is to say such a thing! Because her lover gives her nothing but one gift: he takes everything from her. From her husband she makes demands without giving; to her lover she gives without making demands. She is ungrateful to her husband because he gave her a different kind of car than the one she had dreamt of. She makes little show though he brings her costly gifts every month. But she is ready to kiss the earth if her lover cuts a lock of his hair for her. Love: it is not a bounteous home filled with merriment and dinner parties, or big families and blue-eyed children. And there are no calm winter evenings, full of
tendresse sans passion,
¹⁸
when husband and wife sit at home and discuss the day's events or the newest books or whatever has appeared most recently in the daily papers, or make their plans for the future, go over the details for their next trip abroad or what dishes they should serve at the next party. No, this is not love, dear Diljá. All of this is vanity.

Love, dear Diljá, is a great sacred thing, behind all the farce we women make, the core of the unspeakable, the mystery of the most blessed misfortune, the marvel that hushes all other voices,
la meta profetata fuori del mondo
.
¹⁹

The desire to destroy all honor and happiness, body and soul, all at one moment, that's what it is to be in love. To sit on the steps
before her lover's door and not to get in, to ramble throughout the city in darkness like a drunken harlot in her despair, that's what it is to be in love. To bathe her lover's hands in her tears and look with a shudder into his eyes, as into the depths of her own destiny, that's what it is to be in love. When a woman is no longer anything but a wretched sacrificial lamb under the cumbersome hands of the tormenter, naked, with no will, powerless, dead to herself, quaking, weeping, dizzy, burning, then she loves; and the dogs wait at the door ready to tear her to pieces when she slinks out into the silence of the night.

My husband gave me everything: gold, green forests – everything but what I longed for and was born to enjoy. He was not a man who could take anything from me. He was a businessman, not a lover. He was distracted when he came home at night, and was gone in the mornings. His caresses were businesslike, his embraces mild and prudent as if he were reckoning his accounts. He never broke the seal placed over my heart.

Seasons passed, and what do you think happened? I became pregnant! I had never actually thought that a person could become pregnant. I scarcely believed it when my maid told me. It started with nausea and dizziness, and one day I vomited and passed out. “Madam is surely pregnant,” said the girl. “What damned nonsense is in you?” said I. “Shame on you!”

And when my husband came home that night he had hardly sat down to eat before he took out his pocketbook and started to jot down some numbers. I observed him in secret and realized that I despised the man. For a week I didn't allow him to come to bed with me at night. I had determined to drag it out as long as possible before telling him that I was with child. But I was so helpless and grief-stricken, because there was no way of escape, and finally I felt that there was nothing else to do but try to love him. And one evening I sat down at his knees and whispered this impudent news to him: I was with child.

“Is that so, my dear?” he asked.

Could you imagine a more revolting reply?

But at the birth of Steinn a new sun arose in my life. Feelings wakened that I could never have possibly suspected were hidden in my breast; I lost myself in motherly joy, was reborn.

I loved my child wildly at first, and then I worshipped him. I determined to live for the boy. And I lived for him. I could scarcely tolerate anyone coming near him but me. I stayed awake for him at night, bathed him myself in the morning, looked after all his needs alone, thought of nothing but him all day. My delight was to gaze at him and serve him! I looked upon him as divinity. My beloved little boy – no one has seen a more beautiful boy; his blue eyes were deep and clear, and from his skin and golden locks beamed a dazzling light. He could speak perfectly by the age of two, and he understood everything. Nothing got past him; he asked me about everything, was amazed at everything, admired everything, and all things took on a new shape in my own eyes because I became used to looking at everything from the perspective of the boy.

I felt as if I owned him exclusively, and that everything existed because of him. I felt as if no other child had ever been born in the world except for him, and that no child like him would ever be born again. Grímúlfur wanted us to have a girl, but I flatly refused, protected myself against becoming pregnant again and was cold and capricious toward the boy's father. I felt as if he no longer mattered to me now that I had the boy.

Three years passed.

Grímúlfur set sail and planned on staying abroad for half a year. He asked me to come with him, said that we would take the boy with us, but I chose to stay at home. What did I care about wandering off to another country when I could have this little god to myself at home? Grímúlfur left; the child and I stayed.

That was in the winter. Several months passed. I was scarcely ever up and about, hardly ever went visiting, because the boy put a spell on me. If I stayed more than two hours away from him, I was no longer myself.

One winter night I came home from a party; there I'd been quite warm, but when I came home the house was so cold. I caught cold in the evening, and in the morning I was dangerously ill. It was pneumonia.

I lay for weeks between life and death, because the pneumonia was followed by pleurisy, which caused chronic bronchitis. The doctors urged me to take extreme care.

Finally spring arrived. Grímúlfur came home and had a specialist investigate me carefully, and then it came to light that I had tuberculosis.

That day was one of the most terrifying I have ever lived. Since
childhood my lungs had been weak, and I had always feared tuberculosis like a death sentence. Now I was told that I had become the prey of what I had feared most: the doctor's diagnosis spelled out my doom!

My first thoughts were of Steinn. I broke into convulsive sobs in the doctor's sight, and asked through my tears if God could truly be so unmerciful as to tear me away from my child and topple me into the grave so young, leaving my angel behind, an orphan. I cursed my existence in my derangement and wished that I had never given birth, but instead had been able to enjoy life in ecstasy this fleeting moment, enjoy it like a harlot or a barren woman without having to behold the fruit of my sins, and be allowed afterward to die blissfully. Finally I rose to my feet and shouted: “No, I don't want to die; I can't die and leave my boy! God can demand anything else from me!”

The doctor tried to explain to me that there was no reason for fear. He advised me to move to a more wholesome climate in the fall, said that he could assure me of an improvement by the following spring. And in the hope of my returning home in a year, fully recovered and able to serve my son, it was decided that I should set sail that summer with a Danish girl for a companion. And little Steinn wept in his father's arms and stretched out his hands in the direction of the ship when it left shore with his mother.

But all our hopes come to naught. My stay in Nice, the city of the sun, was a sad exile; my life of recovery was truly a prison sojourn. I was sick almost all winter, sick in body and soul, inert from homesickness. Twice in the winter I coughed up blood, the second time very badly. At that time I was convinced that I would die soon, that
now my time was up, and I had no other wish than to be able to return home to see my child once more before I died. The doctors did all they could to dissuade me from such a dangerous expedition, but I refused to listen, said that I knew I was going to die and wanted to die at home. And I recovered strength at the hope of going north. I left in the middle of the summer. After an eleven-month stay abroad I finally embraced my boy again.

Those who never fasten their hopes to one thing over another are blessed; they are deceived less than I. My boy had grown big. He was four years old, and the memory of his mother had faded from his mind. He wasn't a whit fonder of his mother than of the housekeeper or the maid. It was no longer his delight to sit at his mother's knees and tell her about all the wonders of the world. Now it was most fun to gather whole crowds of boys, drag them into the house, and romp around with them from room to room, or to go visit his playmates in other homes; he was away half the time. And I was sick, had to live according to strict rules, couldn't be on my feet more than a short period of time each day, couldn't go out except at certain times, and then had to walk slowly and calmly without thinking of anything but getting well. My boy didn't want to go with me because I was sick: it was much more fun to harass the maids than to accompany Mother. I was no longer the only one who loved him; everyone loved him.
Everyone wanted to have him near because he was so beautiful and bright. I was left in the cold because I was sick.